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Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries
repelled by the man established in happiness?
Here is our answer:
These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any
particle towards the Sage's felicity: but they do serve towards
the integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries
tends against his Being or complicates the Term: it is not that
the Sage can be so easily deprived of the Term achieved but
simply that he that holds the highest good desires to have that
alone, not something else at the same time, something which,
though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does yet take
place by its side.
In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some turn
of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the
slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his
felicity would be veering or falling from day to day; the death
of a child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial
possession. No: a thousand mischances and disappointments may
befall him and leave him still in the tranquil possession of the
Term.
But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty daily chances!
What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one
who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no
longer to anything below?
If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be
no great matter- kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples,
colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his
own handiwork- how can he take any great account of the
vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if
he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at
all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets
great store by wood and stones, or... Zeus... by mortality among
mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold,
must be that it is better than life in the body.
But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice?
Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars?
But if he go unburied?
Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will
always rot.
But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in
an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument?
The littleness of it!
But if he falls into his enemies' hands, into prison?
There is always the way towards escape, if none towards
well-being.
But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons and daughters
dragged away to captivity?
What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong?
Could he have quitted the world in the calm conviction that
nothing of all this could happen? He must be very shallow. Can he
fail to see that it is possible for such calamities to overtake
his household, and does he cease to be a happy man for the
knowledge of what may occur? In the knowledge of the possibility
he may be at ease; so, too, when the evil has come about.
He would reflect that the nature of this All is such as brings
these things to pass and man must bow the head.
Besides in many cases captivity will certainly prove an
advantage; and those that suffer have their freedom in their
hands: if they stay, either there is reason in their staying, and
then they have no real grievance, or they stay against reason,
when they should not, and then they have themselves to blame.
Clearly the absurdities of his neighbours, however near, cannot
plunge the Sage into evil: his state cannot hang upon the
fortunes good or bad of any other men.
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